07-18-2025
Hard to believe it has been 20 and some days since I have not worked on this Journal
Many things have contributed! I cannot even remember! I think this blow to my head, self-inflicted, when I closed the frige and hit the freezer door above, din’t help … it kept me dazed for a few second and my neck hurts ever since. Plus the back-right side of my skull is antsy! This has slowed me down … but I sleep better!
Lately, in fact I have had consecutive health issues of little importance after all but, which winded me, body and mind! I have found it easier to jolt short note on a notebook, hoping to pick them up later and enter them in the Journal.
Well, handwritten notes … I cannot make sense of the next day or, I cannot read them back, or I have lost interest!
However, when Victoria asked me to write something about individualism, I jumped on it and produce this:
INDIVIDUALISM
At the July 8th Creative Sync of TINYisPOWERFUL, Victoria asked me to write some notes on individualism. She was responding to a remark I had made on the use of that word in a sentence where she contrasted our promotion of “creative collaboration, solidarity economies and community-driven change … [with] institutional funding models that prioritize individualism.”
Not enough, I objected. Individualism is one of America’s most active myth. You cannot just name it and move on. So, let me try to make a few random remarks about it and avoid any attempt at a definition which would inevitably limit its territory.
– Individualism has a highly political content. It defines the relationship between citizens and between citizens and the state. It regards the accomplishment of the self as prioritary and would like to dismiss any interference from the state as an infringement of freedom, although, at times, even a lone rider needs respite, support, even company!
– Individualism has a historically religious content. Traceable to the Reformation which replaced the role of the Catholic church as exclusive agent of God on earth for personal channels of communication with the heavens. This had immediate, general and personal consequences on believers who, now, can see destiny as their own, although, at times, even a helping neighbor is welcome.
– Individualism defines socio-economic liberalism, with its incentives to work hard to make it bigger than the other guy (competition), to climb the social ladder of success and wealth (meritocracy), to spend at will and at whim (consumerism), although, at times, a voice of moderation and wisdom is acceptable to slow down the excesses of the market economy.
– Individualism is much more than whatever I know it can be. One thing I understand though is that the semi-cecity, visual and mental, that opens individualism to criticism is its disbelief in COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION. Among other misses, this one is crucial. It works to the disadvantage of all individualists in two ways, which reinforce each other and pit the entire social order. On the one hand, the individualists’ skin deep aversion for the state as organizer of social life keeps them away from many possible public roles. On the other, when back in the wilderness out there, they confront all the “others” of the world. Instead of composing with diversity, they insist on their exceptionalism they shunt off and away from the miracles of collective intelligence and – even more crucially – collective imagination. This could make them see other futures, other ways, destinies beyond their own fate.
Individualism is the source of exceptionalism.
Exceptionalists have no business in participatory government!
Aren’t they the source of the present turmoil?
Their refusal to draw conclusion,
From their original condition
Of humans among humans,
On the planet which sustains them,
Could only mean that
We are doomed …
That would be counting without new generations of artists, activists, educators, scientists, astronauts, farmers and soldiers who do not stand for war, disinformation, ineducation, ecocide … Not in our names.
This is COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION at work.
TO END THE CULTURE OF EXCEPTIONALISM IS AN ENVIRONMENTAL PRIORITY **
** Inspired by a sentence by Emilie Hache, French sociologist. The original quote reads:”To end the culture of rape is an environmental priority”.
Emilie Hache is a root researcher on ECOFEMINISM.
It will appear in the next NewsLetter, in its new format: shorter but more frequent. More regular, that is.
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I am still reading the biography of ANDRE GORZ, by Willy Gianinazzi. This is something I had wanted to do for quite a long time. But I had to finish my SIMONE WEIL before … and take a rest from such serious subjects.
Why André Gorz? Because for years I read his articles in Le Monde Diplomatique and I dare to say that he updated my education on the concern he had for the human consequences of politics and the economy. I place him right next to Cornelius Castoriadis in my pantheon of teachers, along with Weil, Glissant, Jung and many others. Gorz, beside being remarkable for his pioneering in the realm of productivism and the culture of Plenty, successfully drew the consequences of his thinking and became, after Ivan Illich, a global voice for ecology, socio-ecology, social ecology … everyone’s choice.
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Going back to Gwylène not liking the word Diary. She would rather call it a Journal. She has an important say on the matter because she is publishing it on her newest site – YouCominToo.org – There even will be a way for readers to communicate with us about the content of the whole site and that of the Journal.
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And of course, there is Gaza, the agony of Gaza which makes so many people cry in silence, cry inside, at the same time American politics produces but noise to hide either its inhumanity or its total ignorance of what it means to be human among humans. I still believe the Fall of the Angels of Death (FAD) is coming but, their cruelty will have caused so much damage that I may still witness this country in recovery, but I will be gone, way gone, long gone by the time the America I immigrated to can walk its talk again.
07-19-2025
We were speaking with Omari, at breakfast, about the importance of intergenerationality for the Charleston Rhizome. In the field of ART IN/WITH COMMUNITY, I offered that the passing on of knowledge to a younger crew may require that a conscious choice be made, of finding a young lead-artist to shadow the old founder(s), for as long as it takes to secure a reciprocal understanding of the task at hand. This would mean that ROOTS would have to subsidize the new position, because said lead-artist would most likely be financially insecure and would have to supplement her/his income with a job. Art would come second and the spirit of the art … who knows?
That is when I came up with “Donner demande tellement plus de temps que prendre!”: “It takes so much longer to give than to take!” The kind of sentence that means nothing but encapsulates so much … where the mind runs faster than the senses! It is the reciprocity part which takes time to accomplish successfully. It actually requires that the grounds be secure, for accountability not to remain a pious notion. I touched on this a while ago in this Journal (yes, Journal, now!). The grounds for accountability will be secure when vision and mission of TINYisPOWERFUL will have been dug into and when they will have settled down again, enough for new growth to perk up. Then, the updating process will start. Cause, updating is what will make the new lead-artist relevant and capable of imagining a liberating future.
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I just discovered what Waru Waru agriculture is. A Peruvian technique practiced in the alluvial plains of Lake Titicaca. With diversity of crops, economical irrigation and, what fascinates me most, a great appreciation for the visual arts in agriculture. Just check it out!
What does it mean, to be reminded that art today was agriculture yesterday. In more primitive times. This Waru Waru example only confirms that the practice of art was one with daily life, in a time when humans were one with nature, the body and soul of Mother Earth, respected as such. I do not see why in/with community art cannot play as eminent a role in the processes of present knowledge. Of course the Art paradigm, as an agent in the lager human paradigm, has evolved beyond recognition from one era to the next. Yet there is a constant here, a thread: the practice of art with others as a means of knowledge acquisition, just like research in science, weaves the developmental history of the human species. It affirms the humanity in Humanity.
07-21-2025
This morning, I heard Trump answer a question about his sale of US weapons to Europe and destined to Ukraine. Asked who he was serving by doing that, “I do it for humanity” he declared. Okay. This is yet an other word soiled, tainted, waisted. I note that this sort of appropriation is so in-appropriate and open to ridicule that it might actually help unveil the man’s double talk. Humanity? What about in Palestine? What about ICE and its daily degrading abuses? What about the cuts to cancer or AIDS research? And the cancellation of USAID?
And what about … Man, what a disgrace.
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Forge ahead. Look forward.
Horror surrounds me,
Objects and events turn crepuscular, darker than mortal sin.
– Martha Lou’s memorial: in ‘a Tale for Reparations”, it is, in fact, a hanging, a lynching. The remnants of her building may rot at the end of a rope but her large portrait, peeking above the buildings which were supposed to eradicate her memory, is actually reigning over the whole scene, over the installation. She will not be erased.
– Pharisee: Huckebee pharisee-in-chief, when he calls the July 19 bombing of a christian church on the West Bank blasphemous. All the members of Congress who let the American government do its criminal biddings in Palestine are pharisees.
Huckebee, pharisee, hypocrite, emphatically.
– Caste: if the Black, Brown and poor populations can be called a caste of untouchables ( after Ava Duvernay, Isabel Wilkerson, Loic Wacquant, among others) – whose labor is indispensable – then, what about the billionaire caste, the uppest clan of clans, with its reeking arrogance?
Dispensable too.
And so, is a narrative being spun, a counter-narrative that is, which – if let be – will soon match that of the Heritage Foundation!
I propose that TINYisPOWERFUL write a narrative of hope and use it as a thread to which community(ies) participants will attach and expand upon local facts, stories, writings and artworks, from dance to sculpture, to embroidering to cooking. What else is an art in/with community project made of?
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I just had an urge to remember an excerpt from 01-22-2025 of this Journal, to stress what America is facing daily when blatantly lied to about the reasons why Executive Orders are signed and … executed. The choice I made to quote from a foreign source I found about Erdmute Scheufele, a Green candidate in earlier German elections, shows that gaslighting suffocates people beyond the United States! She is called
– ‘a child killer’, because of her stand in defense of vaccination
– ‘a war monger’ because she supports Ukraine
– ‘a grave digger of industry’, because clean energy is killing coal
– ‘a ghost driver of immigration policies’, for refusing to lock down borders
07-21-2025
Bob Leonard has asked us to be active in his workshop, at ROOTS Camp. This is unusual enough an offer to encourage my gathering some thoughts.
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In regard to what is happening on the US political scene, Trump is now accusing Obama of high treason concerning the 2016 elections … Of course, this is an other cruel trick to distract from the Epstein story and the Palestine cruelty. It reminds me so much of the Nixon imbroglio with the Pentagon Papers and the erasing of tapes. Completely different circumstances but same exact urge to lie, cheat, manipulate … erase!
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In view of all this, I want to start with the CASTE aspect of the exceptional crudeness of American racism.
My starting point is: Extreme racists, in this country, treat the Black and Brown people as the bottom rung on the social ladder, with no way up. Isabel Wilkerson refers to them as the OUTCASTE.
If there is an outcaste it is because every other caste is higher than the outcaste – the lowest of all, so filthy it is untouchable! Except that nothing, on the frontline of dirty, daily labour, gets done without it! The highest caste of all would then be called the upper caste, the TOP CASTE of the billionaires and their allies. Those who believe in their exceptionalism; who withdraw from among the masses because they are ‘better than that’. With their multiple corporations, they intend to own everything, except that … What do you really own if you really own everything? In my mind, a mental shortcut tells me: then, somewhere, you own slaves. That is it. You have ingratiated yourself with essential workers you will not even have to pay!
This might well be Donald Trump’s dream. There are obstacles to this dream, sir. Many obstacles …
Let him dream on, and drawn in dreams!
Yet, there is one obstacle that is inescapable: nature. The top caste has no respect for nature and will not understand, on time, that it cannot plunder and profit from Gaia indefinitely, unilaterally.
I will not attempt to rewrite the book on climate change begetting ever worse tragedies! I will simply show a picture which I found the other day in one of the Guardian’s many photographic albums it offers daily, methodically and so meticulously. Here it is.
I call this: RECIPROCAL DEPENDENCY
The secret of their longevity
I suppose this indigenous man taking care of a child could be from the Amazon.
Domestic enough to share the babysitting. Smart enough to also love and obviously be loved in return, by a primate, the color of his hair. A fashion statement? Possibly. An artistic statement? Also, yes. But why has anthropology been so slow to recognize that wisdom owes nothing to development?
… – Where will this degrowth propaganda take us?
– You tell me.
– Where extractivism or an A bomb will, Sir.
– In caves?
07-29-2025
Hardly recovered from yesterday’s fiasco with the ROOTS pre-Camp Zoom, where I was so frustrated that, when my time came to speak, although I had chosen it, I could not utter words that made any sense under the circumstances!
It took me an unusually good night sleep to calm down and come up with the stream of thoughts below.
I am not sure I should call it a narrative, good enough to send to Bob Leonard. He has asked us to propose one for his workshop, next week, at camp.
This morning then, as I was ruminating over all this, two very clear one-liners came to mind:
– scrap ‘social justice’, say ‘social equity‘ – in line with ‘equity and access’
– Art in/with community is the language of social equity
These two phrases anchor a whole train of thoughts and help me focus on the incident which started this ridiculous episode. How could I be so incapable of synthesizing an idea which I hold so dear?